Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Wednesday July 25, 2012 @09:32AM
from the brought-to-you-by-duke-energy dept.

ananyo writes "Are the knives coming out for ITER? A Senate Department of Energy spending bill, yet to be voted on, would cut domestic research for fusion and directs the DOE to explore the impact of withdrawing from ITER. The proposed cuts for domestic fusion research are in line with those proposed in the Obama administration's budget request but come after the House ... voted to boost ITER funding and to support the domestic program at almost 2012 levels on 6 June. U.S. fusion researchers do not want a withdrawal from ITER yet but if the 2014 budget looks at all like the 2013 one, that could change. 'They're not trying to kill ITER just yet,' says Stephen Dean, president of advocacy group Fusion Power Associates. 'If this happens again in 2014, I'm not so sure.' The problems for fusion could be small beans though. The 'sequester', a pre-programmed budget cut scheduled to take effect on 2 January, could cut 7.8% or more off science and other federal budgets unless Congress can enact last-minute legislation to reduce the deficit without starving U.S. science-funding agencies."

Agreed. 2012 total military spending: $1.030–$1.415 trillion! Just a small fraction of that reallocated to research for something that would benefit all of humanity would make a HUGE difference. Hell while they're at it they should toss a couple billion towards this countries waning educational system.

Well, here's on the Slashdot doesn't like to touch: administrator pay. Administrator pay is a problem in education, healthcare, the corporate sector, government agencies... it's across the board. And when it comes to education it's almost a taboo subject.

Well, here's on the Slashdot doesn't like to touch: administrator pay. Administrator pay is a problem in education, healthcare, the corporate sector, government agencies... it's across the board. And when it comes to education it's almost a taboo subject.

It's not just administrator pay, it's also the sheer size of administration. And pork projects (yes, schools have those too) as well. The education budget for the most part is bloated, with little to show for it.

Oh boy do they ever. The local school district is cutting everything they can and still in danger of going under for lack of funds. Part of that is because no one wants to raise property taxes but largely it's because every year or three for as long as I can remember they've basically been digging ditches just to fill them back in again. Repave a parking lot then almost immediately tear it up to build a new extension, destroy and remake 3 or 4 perfectly good tennis courts in less than a decade (despite not

With activities like that, why would anyone want to pay increased property taxes? Besides, those taxes were enough in the past, they should be enough now. Tax revenues aren't a fixed amount, since they're a percentage of some activity, they rise and fall with that activity (in this case, property values). Just because local governements were fat and happy during the real estate bubble due to massively inflated property values doesn't mean they're entitled to those giant revenues forevermore.

I think a big part of the problem is that eduction is still a state by state affair. People bitch and moan about the feds but if you'd ever dealt intimately with a state or local government they rapidly start looking like incorruptible beacons of virtue and competence by comparison...

My mother taught at a ghetto school for quite a while at the end of her career. I worked there for a semester, and volunteered quite a bit in addition to that. They had gobs and gobs of "technology" (computers, teleconferencing equipment) lying around that wasn't being used, paid for by federal grants -- and that nobody there really knew *how* to turn into actual student learning. They maintain an "aerospace science" magnet program in name only which (for a while) was there in name only and existed just to qualify for federal funding.

What we need to do to fix education is:

1) Pay teachers a salary that is commensurate with highly-trained competent professionals2) Demand that they actually be highly-trained competent professionals3) Get the hell out of their way and stop micromanaging them

[blockquote]The US's education system is the most highly funded system in the world by a large margin already.[/blockquote]

You'd hardly know it from the results.

(Yes, you've got a lot of the best universities, blah blah blah... A) a large chunk of those students are international, and B) your high standard deviation on educational acheivement doesn't change the fact that your average sucks.)

[blockquote]The US's education system is the most highly funded system in the world by a large margin already.[/blockquote]

You'd hardly know it from the results.

(Yes, you've got a lot of the best universities, blah blah blah... A) a large chunk of those students are international, and B) your high standard deviation on educational acheivement doesn't change the fact that your average sucks.)

First, you're right, in K-12, we have the highest spending in the world, and you're correct: you'd hardly know it from the results.

Second, our university system is at the edge of a precipice. Our colleges have been living off of their reputations for years, and other institutions across the world are catching up, or have caught up with us. Harvard and Yale... like Oxford and Cambridge... will always have a brand to sell, but our higher education bubble is going to burst soon, and it's going to make the housing bubble look small by comparison. We have too many colleges with too many students that shouldn't be their learning too much fluff and paying too much for it. If something can't last forever, it wont.

The funny thing is, even if the US cut 100% of that spending overnight, it still wouldn't make up the deficit.

It's approximately the same ($1171/$1253B) [cbo.gov] (depending on whether you use the baseline or proposed budget), and only that bad because of the economy. Projections for the future are $612B/$977B in 2013 down to $175B/$510B in 2018.

If you go back to Reagan and zero out military spending since then, you also zero out the debt (to about 5%). This calculation was based on looking up year-to-year military spending and year-to-year interest on the debt.

The funny thing is, even if the US cut 100% of that spending overnight, it still wouldn't make up the deficit. Military spending, while it certainly doesn't help, is not the biggest problem with US spending. Not even close.

Right now, yields on government bonds are negative out to 20 years. People are paying to lend the US government money.

Given high unemployment, decaying infrastructure and free money, the most sensible thing to do right now is borrow and build.The deficit is not the problem. Paying the interest on government debt is what matters.

Yes, military spending should be cut back drastically. Endless pork for the military, endless, war, and demands for domestic spending cuts "because the government's broke" and "because we can't afford these programs" don't add up.
And now this, cutting fusion research funding, something that could end oil dependence, while giving oil companies billions of dollars in subsidies every year. Which politicians are in the pockets of defense contractors and oil companies? Pretty much all of them.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Eisenhower was brilliant, in this regard. He predicted and warned against the military-industrial complex more or less taking over the country. His military experience didn't make him a warmonger, it let him see the dark underbelly of the military that normal people would not have even imagined.

It should also be pointed out that Ike got elected primarily on the promise to fight the Commies in Korea. His attitude towards war seems to have been seeing it as necessary when faced with opponents like the Nazis and the USSR.

His opponent Adlai Stevenson, on the other hand, really did advocate peaceful foreign relations. He lost handily to Ike in 1952 and 1956.

Yes, and that's a perfectly reasonable attitude towards war IMO. Unfortunately, Korea was well before my time, and also seems to be "the forgotten war" as when we study American history we mostly skip over WWI except maybe for mentioning archduke Ferdinand and the Red Baron, study WWII thoroughly, then briefly mention Korea and give it about as much time as the Bay of Pigs, and then jump right into Vietnam. But Korea was mostly successful, in that even though it was largely a civil war and a proxy war lik

Look -- absolutely ALL of these issues we've got with "dumb government moves" has to do with how politicians get elected.

Term limits are dumb because we already have Congress campaigning every two years, so they are on a money train, and then if you kick them out (after 5 years they get retirement benefits thanks to Republican lawmakers), you only empower the lobbyists and unelected experts who groom them to get elected.

I'm sure Exxon was happy to step in and fund candidates and that's how you've still got

Lets not make it too complicated here. There's an easy enough solution. Fund ITER out of the navy black ops budget.Just like happened historically with fission reactors, I guarantee some admiral is going to be waterski-ing behind a reactor powered aircraft carrier, decades before my kitchen oven is powered by reactor generated electricity. Now with fusion instead of fission. Whatever.

I don't think the US Navy wants to be left behind as the only world power navy who doesn't have fusion reactors in the eng

The military typically only funds research of something that could be built within the next 20 years, usually much less. Fusion is nowhere near that close. The military, despite what you may think of it, is interested in stuff that can produce practical results in the foreseeable future, not theoretical research (and never have been). Fusion research is currently very much theoretical. If you wanted DoD funding for fusion research, you'd have to go to DARPA or something, and they aren't likely to be interes

Subs get fission reactors for two reasons: 1) it lets them hide out underwater indefinitely (especially useful for the "boomer" ballistic missle subs), and 2) they're almost always underwater, so it's not like they have to worry a lot about anyone boarding the ship and taking it over. I'm guessing they probably don't have platoons of marines on board; they don't have the space for it anyway. Aircraft carriers, OTOH, have plenty of space for extra people. But even there, they almost never travel without e

Instead of cutting where its needed (gross government pay and military), they cut everything else instead.

And before hell is raised, yes the military budget CAN be cut. However, the way they have gone about it recently has been messy. 2 wars we're footing the bill for haven't helped either.

While I heartily agree that both the military budget and government employee pay is too high, you're intentionally ignoring the elephant in the room: entitlements. We could completely abolish the military, and entitlements are still going to bankrupt us.

What you call "entitlements", other people call "not dying of cancer", or "being able to eat".

SS and medicare are only a problem because our taxes are too low, and the economy is in the shitter. If we repealed the Bush tax cuts, most of the problems go away. If you repeal the tax cuts, and cut the military budget back to pre-9/11 levels, the problem goes away entirely.

You don't have to agree this is a good thing to do. But you do have to agree that simply saying the problem is "entitlements", is a vast, vast oversimplification.

What you call "entitlements", other people call "not dying of cancer", or "being able to eat".

SS and medicare are only a problem because our taxes are too low, and the economy is in the shitter. If we repealed the Bush tax cuts, most of the problems go away. If you repeal the tax cuts, and cut the military budget back to pre-9/11 levels, the problem goes away entirely.

You don't have to agree this is a good thing to do. But you do have to agree that simply saying the problem is "entitlements", is a vast, vast oversimplification.

First off, what I call entitlements are just that: entitlement spending programs, and they're the most massive chunks in the budget pie. Second, medicare and SS will remain a problem regardless because cost growth is outstripping income from new generations of workers. Third, it is simply a falsehood that repealing those tax cuts will make up for entitlement growth. Not even close, especially in the long run. We have several problems in our budget, but when you look for the biggest ones, entitlements are th

Instead of cutting where its needed (*entitlements*), they cut everything else instead.

FTFY - and I'm soon to be eligible for Social Security. The standard practice for all political administrations since forever has been to always propose to cut whatever is most desirable, popular and necessary, rather than what is least important, most expensive and biggest boondoggle. This assures an outcry about "Don't cut X", setting the debate about the wrong topic and leaving the politicians in charge of ever more money. It has worked since the first democracy (read about Pericles, who invented 'bre

Fusion scientists often get criticized for making unrealistic promises ("Fusion has been thirty years away, for fifty years!" or some variation on that). But take a look at the graph here [wikimedia.org]. The graph shows the funding estimates from a 1976 fusion development plan, with various paths to a reactor. The black curve way at the bottom is the actual funding profile.

Some 20T (yes, 20 trillion) in 2008 and 2009 alone for financial institutions. Plus few trillions every year sucked off the economy via ZIRP policies and rigging all meaningful markets and base market rates (eg. LIBOR scandal). We don't see austerity because of some budget-balancing need, it just bankers who want this money for themselves.

Instead of cutting where its needed (gross government pay and military), they cut everything else instead.

The problem with the Federal budget isn't military spending. Yes defense can be cut, but it's already the one budget item which has been cut the most in the last 50 years [npr.org]. Right now, our annual budget deficit exceeds the defense budget, so we could drop defense spending to zero and we'd still have a budget crisis. And FWIW, defense spending is on the chopping block as well [nationalde...gazine.org] if the Budget Control Act [wikipedia.org]

The military cannot be cut because they'll need the military to put down the insurrection in the States when martial law is declared. Frankly, I don't think it will do them any good. There are so many gun toting civilians and many will step up their game to more powerful methods once the martial law police start coming for their families to cull the population. It's gonna be messy.

Why do I get the feeling this wouldn't be on the cards if Japan had got ITER, as the US essentially demanded in the first place... Once France got it, US interest took a massive nose dive, with multiple calls for investment in a home grown alternative instead.

Why do I get the feeling this wouldn't be on the cards if Japan had got ITER, as the US essentially demanded in the first place... Once France got it, US interest took a massive nose dive, with multiple calls for investment in a home grown alternative instead.

I think you're rewriting history a bit as the USA bailed completely out of the project in the 90s until the canadians pouted and quit in the 00s because they didn't get the construction site and we joined sorta in their place, kinda, at about the same time Japan agreed to stop arguing about where to build it if they got extra job slot quotas. So if anything interest picked up when Japan stopped fighting, not reduced. I suppose "interest decreased" in a sort of prime time reality TV drama sense in that it got less dramatic and more boring once Canada stopped pouting and got evicted from the island or whatever mixed metaphor and Japan stopped picking fights with everyone. On the other hand, after the prime time TV drama ended, they actually started working on stuff and there's dirt being dug up and things being built right now...

It won't be the first time we've bailed, it'll probably happen again.

Kazakhstan wants to join (yeah, Kazakhstan, no kidding)... I suppose as a point of national pride they are a rising country instead of a declining one like the US. They even have a superior medical system. Its embarrassing that replacing us with them will, overall, be an upgrade to the ITER project.

To some extent this is just a larger scale version of what happens every time a school district budget is squeezed. Don't lower mahogany row salaries from $250K to "only" $200K per year because then we wouldn't attract the "leadership" of the best and brightest who are currently running us into the ground, nahh, just threaten to cut something cool and popular like drivers ed or high school football until the taxpayers are beaten into submission and meekly accept higher tax rates.

I'm not rewriting history at all, I remember the massive pressure from the US to give it to Japan and the scramble to find "compensation" so both the US and Japan would back down. I also remember an implicit threat that the US would back out if it didn't go to Japan.

Yeah well sorry maybe that was a little harsh phrase selection. I checked wikipedia and the order is as I recall, the opposite of the order of events you recall. We bailed out, came back momentarily, were not exactly negotiating from a position of strength. If we were planning on taking one for the team and ally with Japan, we wouldn't have bailed out to begin with. I'm confused why the US and japan were supposedly allied as you'd think we'd have pushed harder for the Canadians who bailed out, maybe its

Next article up, some manager whining about how there's a shortage of scientists because he wants to pay almost nothing and the domestic eggheads think they're worth more than $7.25/hr so we'll have to crank open the H1B floodgates until Physicists can only dare to daydream of having the career opportunities of a mcdonalds fry cook. I'm glad I didn't go into science. Would have loved to, but hate grinding poverty even more and don't want to spend my middle age as a taxi driver like happened to all the rocket scientists I know after Apollo.

Next article after that will be some washed up town patting themselves on the back for rolling out a new STEM program for grade school kids, to handle the massive future shortage of STEM employees. You know, the kind of town where 2000 STEM employees just got the axe because one of the STEM educational initiative corporations just moved their HQ from that heartland town to China, and another 200 person foundry just went bankrupt and a 200 person cement factory just closed (this is my home town... I'm not directly affected but it still sucks)

Why is that a problem? It's up to China how to handle immigration for their own country.
Ah, the old it's only racist if white people do it. Didn't you get the memo? Everybody has a god given right to move and occupy whatever land/country they want to move to.

Interestingly, this is already old thinking. Chinese manufacturing will form a dwindling part of their economy and service their own market more and more. Now of course they will keep doing manufacturing, but automation will increase the relative costs of transport, and Chinese workers cost (or will cost within 5 years) as much as Eastern Europeans.

So, although those manufacturing jobs are not coming back (they have evaporated due to robotics), the engineering jobs attendant to local (automated) plants are

Why? You sound all optimistic and kool aid drinky which is fine in a mass media group think way, but... why?

I've eaten great food from innovative and creative and hardworking chefs who aren't paid squat.

I've admired innovative and creative artwork from artists who live in comparative poverty. Ditto music. Music and fine art clowns sometimes Demand that poverty is a mandatory ingredient in good product.

Good engineers are hard to come by. Good mathematicians, physicists are rare.

My advice is is someone says you sound kool-aid drinky the most effective response is likely not to repeat yourself and quote some made up for political motivation.gov stats. Do what you want, do what works for you, do it well, it just doesn't work for me. And that's OK, as long as we're having fun. But you're not convincing me.

Good chefs, artists, musicians, landscapers, textile workers, poets, and tool and die makers are equally rare. Yet very poorly paid. There is no magic connection where having s

Your waitress friend isn't unemployed, she's employed... as a waitress. So according to the government, everything's hunky-dorey for her. The government doesn't recognize the state of "underemployment".

You're right though; in this day and age, you really need to ponder whether it's even worth it to get a degree. For a lot of people, it doesn't seem to be. However, your anecdotal examples are a little telling: math, education, and special ed are not exactly fields with lots of openings.

The stats are not that there is no unemployment in general (there is, a lot of it), just that there is very little employments amongst folk with higher education degrees. This does not mean that they are doing a job corresponding to their degree or that they are well paid. I am not responsible for you not understanding what is written. Of course a bachelor of maths or a bachelor of education is going to have a hard time finding a job! Their degrees are worthless. That being said, their degrees still prov

Of course, great many things are done for the love of it. But as a company, if you rely on your employees to work for the sake of love, you are in for a big surprise.

Exactly. You end up with extremely disloyal employees who will abandon your company for the next job offer that's only slightly higher. And you end up with a shortage of qualified workers, because not many people will bother going into that field, especially when it requires a massive investment in education (and money) to become qualified, a

Considering the size of the U.S. federal budget, it always seems to be smallish programs that are symbolically put on the chopping block when these political debates come up. This one isn't as ridiculous as, say, spending lots of time arguing over NPR's paltry budget, but it's still a pretty small budget, and comes with quid-pro-quos that make the net cost even less. The U.S. contributes 1/11th of the ITER construction costs, and in return American companies get 1/11th of the construction contracts, and U.S

The U.S. contributes 1/11th of the ITER construction costs, and in return American companies get 1/11th of the construction contracts, and U.S. scientists make up 1/11th of the staffing.

So it's quite possible they withdrawn from ITER then go ahead and make their own ITER in the USA.

For an AC that's actually a pretty good idea, you should proudly sign your name to that. Seriously.

The problem with the ITER is there are 535 congress members and "most" of the ITER money as currently budgeted is probably going to come from a small minority of members districts... for example probably more scientists will be hired out of Caltech and MIT than, for example, Wyoming (does WY even have a research university as opposed to a teaching U?). Bringing it in-house like NASA means it'll cost more, b

People starting jobs today are paying 300% more than someone who started their career in the 60s. It's unfair NOT to cut benefits for people who are about to retire. They didn't pay their fair share into the system for most of their careers.

Note that the above doesn't count the VA, which can adds in another $129.6 Billion.

If you assume that the VA is part of "military spending", that makes the total $845.9 Billion.

If you assume VA is NOT part of "military spending", then it probably should be added to "entitlement spending"....

Entitlement spending...

Social Security: $778.6 Billion.

Medicare: $484.4 Billion

"Income Security": $579.5 Billion.

Total: $1842.5 Billion

Not sure if that's all the entitlements, but looks reasonable. Note that Medicaid may or may not be included in "Income Security". If it's not, then add a hundred billion or so more onto the entitlement pile.

Note that payment on the National Debt amounted to $225 Billion. So about 6% of our federal spending vanishes to pay for overspending in previous years....

So, "entitlements" amount to rather more than twice "military spending" if you count VA as "military spending", and 2.75x "military spending" if you count the VA as "entitlement spending"....

Note, by the by, that those two chunks of money ("entitlements" and "military spending" amount to considerably more than we take in in tax revenue. So we could ZERO the rest of the government, and still have a large deficit with those untouched.

One issue I've always had with a military budget - why ever would the US government publish the true dollar amount of the military budget? Wouldn't it be a national security concern that foreign nations could estimate force and equipment strength based on an accurate dollar amount?

Somehow, I have my doubts that the published dollar amount is anywhere close to the real amount.

I may be assuming incorrectly that you feel that the bar for entitlements would be substantially smaller than that for the military. If so you will be quite put out. Some individual entitlements may not be as large as the military budget but taken as a whole entitlements are far larger portion of the budget than the military. A quick search produced this course grained pie chart [wikipedia.org]. If you would like a finer grained breakdown of the budget there is the obligitory XKCD reference [xkcd.com]. Then there is this (Obama's pro

To sum up your post: Deficit (more being spent than taken in) is too high, so the only possible solution is to cut spending (in two categories you list). Do you notice the gap in this logic? Here, I'll highlight it: Deficit (more being spent than taken in)

The current US deficit crisis isn't due to a spike in spending but a collapse in income.

You can't get blood from a turnip. People are already suffering under the tax burden they already have. Heck, half the workers in the country pay no income tax because they can't *afford* to. They need every penny they can get for basic needs like shelter and food.

And when grandpa's monthly retirement check is cut as an "entitlement" and their uncle bob who can only work 3 days a week due to disease gets kicked off disability and can't make rent on the 1-room basement "apartment" anymore, this makes them better off how?

1. We pull back all of our military forces except at a few major naval bases, end the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and tell Europe, Japan and Korea to pick up 100% of their defense budget from now on. Then cut the defense budget by 25%-30%.2. We reduce unemployment benefits to six months instead of two years. Sorry, if you haven't worked in your field for about two years you don't have a career in it anymore. Unemployment benefits I believe are right now about $500B-$600B of the current federal budget.3. We means test the hell out of Social Security and Medicare.4. Release all non-violent drug offenders (including dealers) from prison, end the War on Drugs and send the enforcement personnel DEA and ATF to work for another federal law enforcement agency.5. Privatize TSA, repeal 90% of the legislation behind Homeland Security and just admit that the only sensible reform we really needed post 9/11 was letting the FBI and CIA coordinate on terrorism cases.

But nope, we can't stop bombing foreign backwaters where some jihadi is rattling his sabre and AK47 impotently at the Great Satan(tm) or tell someone they need to back away from the federal trough.

reduce unemployment benefits to six months instead of two years. Sorry, if you haven't worked in your field for about two years you don't have a career in it anymore.

So if someone can't find a job in six months - screw them? Or are you suggesting to replace the other 18 months by government-sponsored courses to re-train the unemployed into another career?
Anyway, as I understand it, unemployment benefits go right back into economy since 100% of them are actually spent right away.

When world and domestic circumstances finally force the USA's hand into doing major things like what you're suggesting (probably due to unavoidable debt constraints), then your suggestions will be (involuntarily) implemented. Until then, your ideas are untouchable, politically because people don't want to give up the American cake while eating it too.

BTW - I'm for legalizing and taxing/regulating marijuana comparable to alcohol, but other dr

I'm looking forward to someone explaing to me why the government needs to save money now, when it can borrow for free? That is to say that the US government can borrow money for zero or even negative interest rates. To me, this seems to say that people have so little faith in the economy that they rather take a little loss but a guaranteed return (even if only via the mythical printing press) than invest their money in the economy. Now, if the government can have money so cheaply, and if my analysis of the reason is correct, then it should be an immediate logical consequence that government should make up the lack of investment in the private sector by spending itself.

Your assumption is that the government has 100% faith in the economy, so if people don't invest in the economy it does on their behalf. What if there is really something wrong with the economy? Why should the government automatically dump money into it?

Some things don't need lots of money to fix. Say hypothetically there are too many environmental regulations so nobody wants to build factories that pump out cheap widgets. Just change the laws.

I think you're misreading me. I'm not talking about government investing, I'm talking about government spending. And really, government can't act as an investor in the way a company can: if the government invests, then it gets its investment back in the form of greater welfare of the populace, not by selling more products as a private manufacturer would.

To me it appears that right now people would rather give their money to the government than to private institutions. Why? Because they know they'll get

Our politics has been infested with the corporate tendency to think short term, just as long as the next quarterly results. Which makes sense, since our representatives answer to the agendas of the corporations that fund them, certainly not the people who elected them.

The result of which is that the USA is declaring its intent to be a declining power in the world. You invest in science and education, or you head towards second rate status in the world. It's that simple.

Our politics has been infested with the corporate tendency to think short term

"Short term" means "next campaign." The problem with science and education investment, is that it NEVER pays off, even in the very long term. If you vote to increase that spending, it will never result in you getting an advertising budget advantage over your opponent.

It might help the country, but nobody ever votes for people who help the country; they only vote for people who buy ads. Ad budgets are voters' primary means of

and/or nuclear plants with passive safety systems and a rational waste storage facilities, it would be a good idea. Instead, well'l use the savings to pay down debt caused by military spending, bail out banks and making sure very wealthy people stay wealthy and get wealthier. We are almost the definition of a culture in decline.

Since when is a 7.8% cut "starving" the budget? With baseline budgeting adding automatic budget increases every year, I'd be surprised if a mere 7.8% cut would actually reduce spending year to year. The public sector has NO clue what the real economy is going through.

If they had any idea what the private sector was going through they would be spending even more. When governments can borrow at negative rates they should do so and use that money to build infrastructure.

.. because RIGHT NOW it's not profitable for Big Energy. If ExxonMobil figured out a way to make billions on it, you can bet your ass the government would be funding it. Big Energy likes us right where they have us: under their collective thumb. And they'll spend billions to keep us there.

Ph.D student in fusion here. (I was one of the authors of this Ask Slashdot [slashdot.org].)

It's important to note that there are a range of opinions on this. Everyone thinks ITER is a good idea, at the right price. That price was originally quoted at $5-billion (with the U.S. picking up 9% of that) when the U.S. made the decision to join in 2003; today the construction cost is estimated at somewhere north of $20-billion. Hopefully now with Motojima as Director-General, this cost will stop rising. (From what I hear, he's being very rigorous about cost and schedule control and pushing the team hard on these fronts.)

The problem for the U.S. is that participation in ITER doesn't make sense without a strong domestic program in place to take advantage of the results that come out of it. And without a (temporary) surge in U.S. fusion funding to get over the ITER construction "hump", the entire domestic program might be "squeezed" out of existence. Check out the graph here:

So it's not so much a matter of "is ITER good science?" (it is!). The question is: "is ITER the right path for the U.S. at a cost of 9% of $20-billion or $25-billion, without a commitment to sustain the domestic program through the ITER construction phase?"

I urge everyone here to go to our website that we set up at fusionfuture.org [fusionfuture.org], which has a lot of information about this issue. We still need your help - the House has restored funding for the domestic fusion program [fusionfuture.org], but the current Senate version of the bill still has the domestic fusion budget slashed (and the fusion experiment at MIT entirely closed down). There is still work to do!

Republicans in Congress won't let them. Even when one of their own, Defense Secretary Gates recommended cancelling various weapons programs because they are no longer suited for battles the military would be fighting and there were better, cheaper alternatives, he got shot down.

As much fun as it is to bash the usually hawkish Republicans, in this case the Democrats are just as bad. They both want these projects as they can direct work and resources to their districts and thus be able to point to something and say I gave you that plant and the good paying high tech jobs that came with it. Now it isn't all Republicans or Democrats as there are some that are principled (truly fiscal conservative R or truly dovish D) but those seem to be exceedingly rare today.

The House (which is controlled by the Republicans) passed a bill that continues funding for ITER and for the fusion experiments in the U.S.. It is Obama and the Democrats in the Senate who are proposing to cut the funding for the fusion experiments.

ITER is the international fusion reaction reaction, its being built over the next 8 years in the south of france, and should hold
a mixture of tritium and deutrium gases at a hot enough temperature and high enough pressure to generate more fusion power
output than the electricity need to create the plasma, ITER should run consistantly in the breakeven range of fusion power.
That said, scientists and not created a system for extracting the energy from the plasma yet, and true energy generation
is left from t